


221C

by 235413



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-09 00:50:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1962699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/235413/pseuds/235413
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary shoots Sherlock in the heart and he wakes up in 221C Baker Street.</p>
<p>(A redo of the near death scene in HLV, where the mind palace is 221C and Sherlock becomes a regular.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	221C

 

Mary shoots Sherlock in the heart and he wakes up in 221C Baker Street.

“I'm dying,” he says, simply.

(control it, the walls around him say in molly's voice and the pain begins, spreading a bloodied map across his body that mycroft tells him is just his neural circuit sending him a final warning, so he really ought to hurry up, oughtn’t he, but his breath is coming far too slowly while the room glitches in and out of sight like infected software and just like that he no longer has to breathe, he has been torn apart and the air in the room is inside him because he is nothing and his lungs have dissolved, so control it mycroft screams but sherlock can't, i can't he says, you have to molly tells him and her slap stings, you have to control it control it control it control it control it control it control it)

“I'm dying,” he says again.

“You betcha,” Moriarty says from the corner.

“You.”

I have kept you like a secret, Sherlock knows but never quite thinks and the pain is so total that he can hardly feel it, kept you buried deep since you went away.

Moriarty rises from his seat, brushing down the suit that he died in. He glances at Sherlock's chest. “Ooh. Bullet wound. Unoriginal, but I can't say I'm not a little flattered.”

(control it control it control it control it)

“You never felt pain, did you?” Sherlock collapses on to the floor and Moriarty stands above him, ignoring the question.

“Nice place you chose for it. Chose to go out in.”

Nice place for it, yes, though oddly nostalgic for a man who is not anchored by people or places, a start line to a race never meant to be won, beginning and end in full circle, _hello sexy_ , an overlap in two parallel orbits by some paradox...

Here is a room that he can breathe in and when he breathes, the air is full of the game to come and a near future free from boredom.

“That's right,” Moriarty says. “Shared real estate.”

(control

it)

“Why did you never feel it?”

Sherlock is dying but his perception will always be the last thing he clings to, and he slows time around them to see Moriarty's smile flicker off and on again in the quietest of microexpressions.

“I always felt it. And...” He offers Sherlock a hand.

“You will too,” Moriarty says.

But the real secret is that you already do, Moriarty doesn't say.

Sherlock controls it.

He doesn't shake Moriarty's hand this time. But he slips a key from it into his own. “Yes, there is a key this time, don't look at me like that.”

Sherlock unlocks the door to 221C and Moriarty's voice (“You're not going, are you? Was it something I said?”), which fades into what he will later call a shock induced hallucinatory reaction, is knowing and teasing and calm.

 

*

“I've forgiven you,” Moriarty tells him a month later as Sherlock gasps and bolts upright, two hand prints of bruises around his neck.

“Going back on your word like that in our little showdown. There was me, only trying to help you along. One little push. But I'm not angry with you, not even a little. You, on the contrary, should be angry with yourself. Just you wait.”

Moriarty watches Sherlock struggle for a minute before rolling his eyes. “It's obvious! Your panic is blocking the air flow through your trachea. Breathe. Though I suppose we've always found breathing to be boring...”

“Pain,” Sherlock chokes. “I need to stop the pain.”

Sherlock is boring. Only boring people aren't bored. Don't waste your fear on pain, waste it on being boring.

Moriarty smiles. “Don't ask me. You're the expert.”

Ignoring pain is ignoring boredom. He is bored everyday, he is in agony every day.

And Sherlock controls it because he is always controlling it.

 

*

A week goes by and Sherlock takes a crowbar to the face.

“Again? Have you been running with a more dangerous crowd lately,” Moriarty says, “Or do you just miss me?”

Sherlock writhes on the floor, twisting onto his side, and sees the pair of shoes where he had once found them. Before London became empty and exhausting, taking so much to distract from so little.

“I suppose I am a lot to replace. Stay, would you? Personally I think it'd hurt far less this way, and I am you after all...”

A time when there was a certainty in this great unknown, this _Moriarty_ , an assurance that the game was on and he would live the next few days.

His heart rate steadies.

“One of these days,” Moriarty says sadly.

 

*

Later Sherlock will be bored and tired and reckless for the last time.

Moriarty will greet him with a handshake when he arrives.

I have kept you like a secret since you went away, Sherlock thinks but won't remember, though maybe you were always there.


End file.
